The Letter Their Father Left Behind
Graduation was the second Saturday in May. The ceremony was in the big arena on campus, the one where the basketball team plays, and it was packed, four thousand people maybe, families all down the folding-chair rows on the floor and up in the stands. I wore the dress I had made myself, a blue floral thing I had sewn new for the occasion, and I sat on the floor in the family section between an empty chair I had saved out of habit for nobody and Patricia Satterfield, who had driven over in a white Cadillac and who said, when she sat down, Well, June, we made it. We. She said we.
The thing about a graduation that size is they do not let family speak. It is all deans and provosts and a long roll of names. So I was not expecting anything. I was there to watch three girls in blue gowns walk a stage, which was already more than Patricia’s arithmetic would ever have allowed, three sisters graduating college on one afternoon, and I had decided that was going to be enough for me, that was going to be the answer to the quiet question, and I was holding myself together on that.
Then, after the degrees were conferred and before they turned us loose, the provost came back to the microphone and said they had an unusual request from three graduating seniors, sisters, who had asked for two minutes, and that the university had decided, given the circumstances, to allow it. I did not understand. Patricia leaned over and said, What is this, in a voice that had gone careful. And then the big screens above the floor lit up with a photograph I knew, Carleen and Wade on their wedding day outside our church, and then another, the three babies in one basket, and then one of me, young and tired, with a baby on each hip and flour on my apron, a picture I did not even know existed, and my knees went.
My three girls walked out to the center of the floor in their caps and gowns, Hannah and Katie and Josie, and Hannah took the microphone, and her voice only shook a little.
She said, Most of you do not know us. We are triplets. Our parents died when we were babies, in a car wreck, twenty two years ago this November. We do not remember them. We have never had a single memory of our mother’s voice or our father’s face. We were four months old.
The arena had gone dead quiet. Four thousand people.